A Real Yes
by dreambeliever617
Summary: I managed to accidentally delete this story from the site, so I'm submitting it again. Of course, being me, I made a few edits and changes before doing so :) It's a brief, fluffy one-shot set in a post-S7 universe in which Rory hasn't yet accepted OR rejected Logan's S7 marriage proposal. Thank you so much for reading!


**A Real Yes**

"Is this a _real_ yes?" Logan asked. He looked at her with eyes that held a depth and intensity surprising to those who chose to notice only his perpetually playful smirk and enduring "party or perish" reputation. He had gamely lived down to it for several years before finally setting higher standards for himself and discovering that he rather enjoyed the ascension.

"Well, I didn't bother with a certificate of authentication or anything," Rory replied, sounding less playful and more on edge than she'd intended. Not that she was able to gauge her own tone too effectively at the moment: she had a common (but still uncommonly annoying) cold that had blocked part of her hearing and rendered her voice almost unrecognizable. "Seriously," she continued, putting down her book just long enough to reach for more tissues, "it's a _real_ yes. Go, enjoy, and tell everyone I say hi. Maybe something more interesting and witty than a generic 'hi'-you're the socially graced extrovert of our duo, so you should be able to think of something better."

"You'll be missed," Logan said, heading to the door at an uncharacteristically slow pace. "By me especially, not just by 'everyone.'"

Rory wanted to say she'd miss him, too, but somehow the words seemed stuck in her raw, strep-infected throat. Besides, she told herself, since when had she been one to sit around "missing" a guy who'd be gone just a few hours? She had her beloved books, and her even more beloved Mom and best friend (yes, they were the same person) was just a quick, 100-words-per-minute phone call away. She wasn't the type of girl who needed her boyfriend surgically attached to her on a Saturday night just to feel content, even and especially one she loved with the absurd intensity that she did Logan-or at least she sincerely didn't _want_ to be that girl, which her Sudafed-addled mind told her should count for something. So she just said a breezy "see you", and when he started to turn around to give her a hug and kiss goodnight, she reminded him not very gently that she was probably contagious, and more than probably not in the mood to be touched.

He made it a few steps closer to the door before turning back around. "So, not to dig up the past, which you know that I of all people think should usually stay buried-"

Rory nervously cut him off. "Logan, I'm too weak to shovel right now."

"Let me do the manual labor, then, okay? It's just that occasionally you've said you're okay when you-and we-are not actually okay at all. Which I get, but sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between that _real_ yes we've been talking about and "I'll _say_ yes because I don't want to cause a conflict or risk anyone on earth ever being mad at me, but deep down I _really_ mean no, and the secret resentment I harbor will come out in all sorts of unintended, more-damaging-to-us-than-a-real-fight-would-have-been ways."

"Guess the third time you had to take Psych 101 really was the charm for you, huh?" Rory said, smiling weakly. "Maybe you can go into practice with Paris's life coach instead of the whole 'inheriting a media empire' thing."

Logan sat down in a chair that was about halfway between the couch she was sprawled out on and the front door. "So I kind of feel like I should go tonight. It's Finn's birthday, and with the way he drinks and the number of husbands who tend to come after him with shotguns once they hear what he does with their wives, who knows how many birthdays the guy has left?"

"Agreed," Rory said, her ponytail nodding along for emphasis. "You _should_ go. It's just that…"

"That you don't want me to?" For a man who had been derided by a couple of people from his past as a self-absorbed hedonist, Logan could be highly perceptive about other people's thoughts and feelings. Perhaps more so than Rory herself who, while fiercely devoted to the few people she loved and sharp enough a _cademically_ , knew she could be just a tad emotionally oblivious – about other people's real feelings and her own.

She nodded, sniffling miserably into a Kleenex. "And it's _not_ because I'm one of those girls who always needs her boyfriend within validation distance," she said firmly, forgetting for a moment that that accusation had come from somewhere deep in her own mind, not from Logan himself.

"You? You've got a slew of non-me interests, that freakishly close bond with your mom and friends who love you enough to pretend they believe I really have become a better man, and lofty goals to one day break scoops from the ditches of various war zones," Logan agreed. "Plus, you need your alone time, or you start to act like an extra from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. It's a good thing I've got this slightly oversized ego, or it'd be enough to make a guy feel unimportant. So, now that we've got all that established, what's with wanting my company more than usual on this particular evening?"

"Because," Rory burst out, with an intensity she had no idea she felt until it started tumbling out of her mouth, "I need to know you can handle _this."_ She lifted one pale arm from underneath her blanket long enough to wave it rather dramatically around the room.

Logan followed the back-and-forth motion of her arm with a mixture of amusement and confusion. "Ace, you're officially cut off from that cold medicine. Care to let me in on which part of that nebulous "this" I'm supposed to be proving I can handle?" 

"So we don't know if we want to get engaged," Rory began, and before she could continue, Logan gave her a look that radiated enough raw pain to render her temporarily mute. Sometimes it was easy to forget that even though her determinedly optimistic, life-loving boyfriend refused to dwell on his more angsty emotions, he still felt them. Quite deeply, in fact.

" _You_ don't know if you want to get engaged," Logan reminded her, in a voice that was quiet but firm and so utterly devoid of its usual playfulness that she almost didn't recognize it as his own. " _I_ know. You're unsure, which I'm totally going to be patient about to the point where I'll even hand you extra butter and syrup while you waffle, but don't say I don't know. I do."

"I'm just saying," Rory continued quietly, wondering whether her eyes were watering from the cold or some other cause she didn't care to identify, "that if we're going to be each other's "'til death do they part", there's going to be a whole lot of these nights before that death part inevitably rolls around."

"So you want me to stay home tonight so that we can work on each other's eulogies?" Logan guessed. He grinned at her, resolutely resuming his usual good cheer.

Rory shifted on the couch to look right at him. This was not a hardship. Logan exuded a vitality, energy and confidence that had always proved as infectious as Rory's current illness. _We can do this,_ he always seemed to be saying, without even realizing he was saying anything at all. _We can and we will. We'll jump into all of life's adventures just like we did at that LDB event, and we'll do it together, hand in hand, and somehow wherever we land, we'll be okay. All you have to do is trust me – and yourself - enough to jump…"_

"Rory, are you daydreaming again? Mentally composing pro and con lists? Carefully scripting exactly what you're going to say to me right now?"

"You always know an unnerving amount about what goes on in this odd head of mine." She rested that aforementioned head against his shoulder. He got her. Rory, a quietly jumbled combination of what she considered to be some very inconveniently contradictory traits, had never expected to be truly gotten. _"_ I was thinking-"

"Three of the scarier words in the English language. Have we not already established that certain types of thinking are inversely correlated with happiness and sanity?"

"-about how _this_ is what some of our days and nights up to and through senior citizenship will be like, staying in because one of us is too sick or busy or tired even after the usual gazillion gallons of coffee to go out. There won't always be cliffs to jump off, glamorous parties to go to, friends' birthdays to celebrate with a zillion drinks or new trendy restaurants to eat at, and I wouldn't even want there to be."

"Me, neither," Logan said. "The portions at those places tend to be way too small, and you wait interminably for a tiny table that..." He cut himself off before Rory could do it for him.

"I'm serious."

"You often are, Rory, and believe it or not, I love that about you."

She felt herself flushing in a way that couldn't be attributed to her fever. "I love you for _not_ being so serious and making me a tad less uptight in the process, but how you know that when the situation calls for it…"

"-And it's calling right now," Logan finished. "The situation's calling for it, and my appropriate seriousness and I are answering on the first ring. Keep talking, Ace."

"The point is that this..." Rory swept that same arm through the air while Logan looked on with the same bemused grin "…has to be enough. For both of us. The quiet nights, the times when all we have for entertainment is each other, books, and whichever famewhores are currently embarrassing themselves on those MTV reality shows. The times when one of us is too sick to be remotely enjoyable company unless refilling each other's glasses of Gatorade picking up each other's used tissues is your new and utterly warped idea of fun. If that kind of staid, tame, domesticated existence is not enough for you, if you need someone who's always glamorous and 'on' and ready to party and who has a last name that your parents will approve of more than mine, then I'll understand." Her heart was pounding so loudly that she wondered if he could hear it. She moved her head against his chest to make sure his own heart wasn't galloping quite as quickly as hers was. "Especially if you define "understand" as intellectually acknowledging that we're not going to work out but feeling empty and miserable for the next several centuries anyway."

Logan lifted her head and kissed her, waving off her half-hearted warnings about germ transmission and her general state of grossness. "I had a feeling that "in sickness and in health" section of the vows we'd be reciting was sloshing around that brilliant mind. And to think my parents used to warn me that the women I met would only be focused on the "for richer or poorer" part, hoping a cleverly written prenup could spare them from any chance of the latter. I didn't think it would matter because I was convinced I'd never say those words to anyone anyway. I didn't think I'd meet anyone I wanted to spend more than a few weeks with, let alone a lifetime. But then I met you, and I realized why people still want to get married despite the grim statistics and the depictions of marriage on those made-for-TV movies your mom makes us watch and mock with her. It's because I'd rather stay home every night for the rest of my life pouring you as many artificially flavored liquid electrolytes as your poor bladder can handle than go out and have increasingly un-fun "fun" with anyone else in the world. I'm here for better _and_ for worse, though I'd bet on us having a whole lot more of the 'better.'"

"Logan…"

"Here, I can see you're in dire need of more Kleenex."

"It's your fault for making beautiful, romantic speeches about electrolytes when I'm already congested," she said, sniffling into the new wad of tissues he gallantly handed over to her. She was dimly aware of how unattractive she must look, followed by the happy realization that she didn't care, and that Logan didn't, either.

"I'm sorry I even thought of going out to Finn's bash tonight. It's just you said I should go…"

"That'll teach you to take me at my actual word," Rory joked, giving him a sheepish smile. "Seriously, I want you to go. Really and truly. I'll punish myself with a ban on books, coffee and oxygen if I even start to get all passive-aggressive about it tomorrow. Whatever I was feeling weird about, the things you said were enough to de-weird me forever."

"Don't you dare de-weird," Logan warned. "I love you weird. Normal people are scarily boring. Speaking of which, I'll probably find tonight both scary _and_ boring, so I'm sure I'll be back in an hour or so-somewhere in between buying Finn the obligatory birthday shot and watching the ambulance cart him off to get his stomach pumped again."

"Stay out late," Rory urged. "Have the kind of fun you used to have before we were us. Notthe kind of fun that happens to involve a harem of women who want you for all the wrong reasons, of course, but feel free to drink, eat and be monogamously merry 'til sunrise"

He cocked his head to the side and looked at her curiously. "What's with you suddenly wanting me to party like Nic Cage in the third act of Leaving Las Vegas?"

"Sometimes I just feel like I changed too much about who you are, and sooner or later, it'll feel like too much of a sacrifice, and you'll want to change back," Rory said. She hadn't realized how much she worried about that until she said it. Maybe they should mention somewhere on the warning label that extra strength cold medication could function as truth serum when ingested by someone sufficiently neurotic.

Logan was a man of an infinite variety of smiles. The one he wore at the moment made her heart turn lopsided cartwheels.

"You don't have magical transformative powers, Ace. I hate to break it to you, but we met at a time when I was ready to make some changes anyway. For the right person, that is. And you were that right person. _Are_ that right person. Always will be, no matter what."

There was a pause while his words hovered in the narrow space between them. _Always will be, no matter what._

"Alright then, Ace," Logan said, breaking the silence with an uncharacteristically awkward shrug. "I'll be back soon, and with a few extra bottles of that lime green grossness in tow. And with the usual 17 pounds of junk food as well. Why am I not remotely surprised that you're the one person I know whose appetite actually gets even huger when you're sick?"

"Logan, it's a real yes," Rory blurted out.

He paused at the door to grin at her. "Yeah, that's been firmly established. You really do want me to go have the promised birthday drink with Finn; you really won't mind that I took a quick break from my Florence Nightingale duties; you really-"

"Want to marry you!" Rory shouted. She started laughing and crying at the same time, and then punctuated the most important declaration of her life with a violent sneeze. "It's a yes. A _real_ yes. Yes, I will be your wife. Yes, I want to spend the rest of our lives together. Yes, we will be writing our own vows for the wedding, because your earlier speech reminded me that the traditional ones are kind of generic and antiquated."

"I'm liking this yes thing," Logan said, a sudden hoarseness in his voice that even Rory's clogged ears couple pick up on. "Mind if I play along? Yes, you just made me the happiest man alive. Yes, I will love you for life and longer. Yes, I'm more anxious about your family's reaction than mine. And, yes, I know that you probably composed no fewer than 12 pro and con lists en route to this momentous decision and would love to see them at some point and…it's a real yes?"

She kissed him, really and truly and completely, by way of response.


End file.
